Twa Maryit Wemen and the Wedo_, and the minor poems of Dunbar? If he
has, would he pronounce that these “flowers” are “too flowery”--these
“odours” “too fragrant,” or would he feel the absurdity of generalizing
on ludicrously insufficient knowledge? His verdicts on the other Scotch
poets are marked by the same superficiality, and we regret to add
flippancy. To class Henryson among poets whose style is “florid” and
whose roses are “splendid but too full-blown” is to show that M.
Jusserand knows as little about him as he seems to know about Dunbar. In
all Henryson’s poems there are only three short passages which could by
any possibility be described as florid. The prose of the fifteenth
century fares even worse at his hands. Capgrave is mentioned only in the
bibliography! Of the interest and importance of Pecock, historically and
intrinsically, he appears to have no conception; on the real
significance of the _Repressor_ he never even touches, and how indeed
could he in the less than one page which is assigned to one of the most
remarkable writers in the fifteenth century? A page suffices for the
_Paston Letters_, and four lines for Malory’s _Morte d’Arthur_!
Now we would ask M. Jusserand, in all seriousness, what possible end can
be served by a book of this kind, except the encouragement of everything
that is detestable to the real scholar: superficiality, want of
thoroughness, and false assumption, and what is more, the public
dissemination of error, and of crude and misleading judgments. Such a
work as the present, the soundness and trustworthiness of which
ninety-nine readers in every hundred must necessarily take for granted,
can only be justified when it proceeds from one who is a master of his
immense subject, from one whose generalizations are based on amply
sufficient knowledge, whose suppressions and omissions spring neither
from carelessness nor from ignorance, but from discrimination, and in
whose statements and judgments implicit reliance can be placed. To none
of these qualifications has M. Jusserand the smallest pretension.
We have no wish to seem discourteous to M. Jusserand or to say anything
which can cause him annoyance, but it is no more than simple duty in any
critic with a becoming sense of responsibility to discountenance in
every way the production of such books as these. They are not only
mischievous in themselves, but they form precedents for books which are
more mischievous still. We like M. Jusserand’s enthusiasm, but we would
exhort him to reduce the flatulent dimensions, which his ambition has
here so unhappily assumed, to that more tempered ambition which gave us
the monographs on Piers Ploughman and on the Tudor novelists.
DE QUINCEY AND HIS FRIENDS[26]
[Footnote 26: _Personal Recollections, Souvenirs, and Anecdotes of
Thomas De Quincey and his Friends and Associates._ Written and collected
by James Hogg.]
To a thoughtful reader there is, perhaps, no sadder spectacle than those
sixteen volumes which represent all that remains to us of Thomas De
Quincey. What superb powers, what noble and manifold gifts, what
capacity for invaluable and imperishable achievements had Nature
lavished on this extraordinary man! Metaphysics might for all time have
been a debtor to that vigorous, acute, and subtle intellect, at once so
speculative and logical, so inquisitive and discriminating. Æsthetic
criticism might have found in him a second Lessing, and literary
criticism a superior Sainte-Beuve. For, in addition to all that would
have enabled him to excel in abstract thought, he had--and in ample
measure--the qualities which make men consummate critics: rare power of
analysis, the nicest perception, sensibility, sympathy, good taste,
good sense, immense erudition. He might have contributed masterpieces to
Theology, to History, to Economic Science. But they know not his name.
He has set his seal on nothing but on English style. About a hundred and
fifty articles contributed to magazines and encyclopædias, some of them
of a high order of literary merit, many of them simply worthless, the
majority of them containing what is inferior so disproportionately in
excess of what is valuable that they may be likened to dustbins, with
jewels here and there glittering among the rubbish;--this is what
represents him. It is as a master of style, by virtue of what he
accomplished as a rhetorician and prose poet only, that he will live.
But this, comparatively scanty as it is, is of pre-eminent, of unique
value, and will suffice to secure him a place for ever among the
classics of English prose. He has also another claim, if not to our
reverence, at least to our curious attention and interest,--and that
attention and interest he can scarcely fail to excite in every
generation,--his autobiographical writings give us a picture, and that
with fascinating power, of one of the most extraordinary personalities
on record.
Indiscriminating admiration is among the most pleasing traits of youth,
but in men of mature years it loses its attractiveness. When it is no
longer the effervescence of juvenile enthusiasm for which all make
allowance, it becomes, like the levities of boyhood affected in middle
life, merely vapid folly. In relation to its object it not only defeats
its own ends, but is apt to make recipient and donor alike ridiculous.
Nor is this all. By some curious law of association which we cannot
pretend to explain, its almost inevitable ally is dulness, and dulness
of a peculiarly wearisome and exasperating kind. During the last few
years these peculiarities have become so alarmingly epidemic that it
really seems high time to form, on the principle of Mr. Morris’s Society
for the Preservation of Ancient Monuments, a Society for the
Preservation of Literary Reputations. When those “of whom to be
dispraised were no small praise” take to eulogy and editing, an unhappy
Classic may well look to his true friends. It is nothing less than
appalling to behold the mountains of rubbish now gradually accumulating
over the work--the real work--of such poets as Wordsworth, Shelley, and
Keats; rubbish of their own, rescued with cruel industry from the
oblivion to which they would themselves have consigned it, rubbish of
their commentators and editors, dulness and inanity unutterable. “What,
sir,” asked an Eton boy of Foote, “was the best thing you ever said?”
“Well,” was the reply, “I once saw a chimney-sweep on a high prancing,
high-mettled horse. ‘There,’ said I, ‘goes Warburton on Shakespeare.’”
But it is not in the Warburtons, not in the chimney-sweepers, that the
mischief lies; it is in those who may be called the scavengers and
sextons of literature, in those who, utterly unable to discern between
what is precious and what is worthless in a man’s work, thrust all,
without distinction, into prominence, and thus not only enable an author
to “write himself down,” but, by their indiscriminating eulogies, assist
him in his suicide. The subtlest form, indeed, which detraction can
assume is over-praise, for a man is thus forced to give the lie to his
own reputation.
No one, perhaps, has suffered so much from ill-judging admirers as De
Quincey. If ever an author needed a judicious adviser, when preparing
his works for publication in a permanent form, and a judicious editor,
when the time had come for that final edition on which his title to
future fame should rest, it was the English opium-eater. But, unhappily,
he had no such adviser in his lifetime, and he has had no such editor
since. He consequently reprinted much which ought never to have been
reprinted at all, and he omitted to reprint some things which would have
done honour to him. His besetting faults, even in his vigour, were
loquacity and silliness, a habit of “drawing out the thread of his
verbosity finer than the staple of his argument”--a tendency to peddle
and dawdle, as well as to indulge in a sort of pleasantry, so attenuated
as to border closely on inanity. As he grew older these habits became
more confirmed. His puerility and garrulousness in his later writings
are often intolerable. But this was not the worst. In revising some of
his earlier papers, and particularly the _Confessions_, he not only
imported into them tiresome irrelevancies and superfluities, but, in
emending, ruined the glorious passages on which his fame as a
rhetorician and prose poet rests; such has been the fate, among others,
of the exquisite description of the powers of opium,--the superb passage
beginning, “The town of L.. represented the earth with its sorrows and
its graves,”[27] and of the dreams in the second part of the
_Confessions_, particularly of the sublime one beginning, “The dream
commenced with a music.”[28]
Mr. James Hogg tells us that his design in publishing the present volume
was that he might “place a stone upon the cairn of the man” who had
treated him “with an almost paternal tenderness.” We sincerely
sympathize with Mr. Hogg’s pious intention, but we submit that the
truest kindness which he, or any other admirer of De Quincey could do
him, would be not to augment but to lighten the cairn which indiscreet
admirers are so industriously piling over him. To change the figure, the
best service which could be rendered to De Quincey would be to relieve
him of his superfluous baggage, not to add to it. His fame would stand
much higher, if his sixteen volumes were vigorously weeded; if the
sweepings and refuse of his study, so injudiciously given to the world
by Dr. Japp and Mr. Hogg, were given instead to the flames; and if
reminiscents and biographers would only leave him to tell, in his own
fashion, his own story, especially as it is one of those stories the
interest of which depends purely on the telling. We have already
expressed our sympathy with Mr. Hogg’s pious intention. It only remains
for us to express our regret that Mr. Hogg’s piety should have taken the
form of the most barefaced piece of book-making which we ever remember
to have met with. Addison, if we are not mistaken, somewhere describes a
man to whom a single volume afforded all the amusement and variety of a
whole library, for, by the time he had arrived at the middle, he had
completely forgotten the beginning, and when he arrived at the end, he
had completely forgotten the whole. Mr. Hogg appears to proceed on the
assumption that it is pretty much the same with the public and its
memory, that its capacity for amusement is permanent, but that its
recollection of what has amused it is so treacherous, that repetition
will be sure to have all the attraction of novelty. This is, no doubt,
unhappily true. But it is a truth which no critic has a right to
concede.
All that is of interest in this volume is little more than the literal
reproduction, in another shape, of material embodied in a Life of De
Quincey, published by Dr. Alexander Japp, under the pseudonym of H. A.
Page, in 1877. Its exact composition is as follows. Eliminating the
preface and the index, the book consists of 359 pages. Of these, seventy
consist of a dreary _réchauffé_ by Dr. Japp himself of his own Life of
De Quincey, and of the additional information contained in his edition
of the Posthumous Works. Next comes a series of reminiscences, extracted
from Dr. Japp’s Life, from Dr. Garnett’s edition of the _Confessions_,
from the _Quarterly Review_, and from other sources all equally
accessible. Then Mr. Hogg himself opens fire with _Days and Nights with
De Quincey_. An essay--“On the supposed Scriptural Expression for
Eternity”--excellently illustrating De Quincey in his senility, is
reprinted, with awe-struck admiration, from the American edition of his
works.
For the purpose, presumably, of adding to the bulk of the book, Moir’s
ballad, _De Quincey’s Revenge_, is included, though its sole connection
with De Quincey is, that it deals with a legend concerning the possible
ancestors of a possible branch of his possible family. Then we have one
of Mr. Shadworth Hodgson LL.D.’s _Outcast Essays_, “On the genius of De
Quincey,” the reason for the hospitable entertainment of the outcast
being by no means apparent. Among other dreary trifles is a reprint of
a Latin theme, one of De Quincey’s college exercises. As Mr. Hogg has
chosen to reprint and translate this, it would have been as well to
print and translate it correctly. “Quæ ansibus obstant” should, of
course, have been “ausibus,” and “oculi perstringuntur” cannot possibly
mean “are spellbound,” but “are dazzled.”
The republication of these pieces was, we repeat, a great mistake,
another lamentable illustration of the cruel wrong which officious and
ill-judging admirers may inflict on a writer’s reputation. Talleyrand
once observed that, a wise man would be safer with a foolish than with a
clever wife, for a foolish wife could only compromise herself, but a
clever wife might compromise her husband. Substituting ‘unambitious’ for
‘foolish’ and ‘ambitious’ for ‘clever,’ we are very much inclined to
apply the same remark to a great writer and his friends. It requires a
Johnson to support a Boswell, and a Goethe to support an Eckermann.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 27: See Works. Black’s Edit., Vol. I. p. 212, compared with
original Edit., pp. 113-114.]
[Footnote 28: _Id._, p. 272 and original Edit., pp. 177-178.]
LEE’S _LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE_[29]
[Footnote 29: _A Life of Shakespeare._ By Sidney Lee.]
It is a pleasure to turn from the slovenly and perfunctory work, from
the plausible charlatanry and pretentious incompetence which it has so
often been our unwelcome duty to expose in these columns, to such a
volume as the volume before us. It is books like these which retrieve
the honour of English scholarship. A wide range of general knowledge,
immense special knowledge, scrupulous accuracy, both in the
investigation and presentation of facts, the sound judgment, the tact,
the insight which in labyrinths of chaotic traditions and conflicting
testimony can discern the clue to probability and truth--these are the
qualifications indispensable to a successful biographer of Shakespeare.
And these are the qualifications which Mr. Lee possesses, in larger
measure than have been possessed by any one who has essayed the task
which he has here undertaken. A ranker and more tangled jungle than that
presented by the traditions, the apocrypha, the theories, the
conjectures which have gradually accumulated round the memory of
Shakespeare since the time of Rowe, could scarcely be conceived. In this
jungle some, like Charles Knight, have altogether lost themselves;
others, like Joseph Hunter, have struck out vigorously into wrong
tracks, and floundered into quagmires. Halliwell Phillipps, sure-footed
and wary though he was, certainly had not the clue to it. But Mr. Lee,
who can plainly say with Comus,--
“I know each lane, and every alley green,
Dingle or bushy dell of this wild wood,
And every bosky bourne from side to side,
My daily walks and ancient neighbourhood,”
has thridded it, and taught others to thrid it, as no one else has done.
And he will have his reward. He has produced what deserves to be, and
what will probably become, the standard life of our great national poet.
Mr. Lee’s book is substantially a reproduction of his article on
Shakespeare, contributed to the _Dictionary of National Biography_, the
high merits of which have long been recognised by scholars; and he has
certainly done well to make that article popularly accessible by
reprinting it in a separate form. But the present volume is not a mere
reproduction of his contribution to the Dictionary; it is much more. He
has here filled out what he could there sketch only in outline; what he
could there state only as results and conclusions, he here illustrates
and justifies by corroboration and proof. He has, moreover, both in the
text and in the appendices, brought together a great mass of interesting
and pertinent collateral matter which the scope of the Dictionary
necessarily precluded.
More than a century ago George Steevens wrote: “All that can be known
with any degree of certainty about Shakespeare is that he was born at
Stratford-on-Avon, married and had children there, went to London, where
he commenced actor, wrote poems and plays, returned to Stratford, made
his will, died, and was buried there.” And, if we set aside probable
inferences, this is all we do know of any importance about his life. His
pedigree cannot certainly be traced beyond his father. Nothing is known
of the place of his education--that he was educated at the Stratford
Grammar School is pure assumption. His life between his birth and the
publication of _Venus and Adonis_ in 1593, is an absolute blank. It is
at least doubtful whether the supposed allusion to him in Greene’s
_Groat’s Worth of Wit_, and in Chettle’s _Kind Heart’s Dream_ have any
reference to him at all; it is still more doubtful whether the William
Shakespeare of Adrian Quiney’s letter, or of the Rogers and Addenbroke
summonses, or the William Shakespeare who was assessed for property in
St. Helens, Bishopsgate, was the poet. We know practically nothing of
his life in London, or of the date of his arrival in London; we are
ignorant of the date of his return to Stratford, of his happiness or
unhappiness in married life, of his habits, of his last days, of the
cause of his death. Not a sentence that fell from his lips has been
authentically recorded. At least one-half of the alleged facts of his
biography is as purely apocryphal as the life of Homer attributed to
Herodotus.
But probability, as Bishop Butler says, is the guide of life, and on the
basis of probability may be raised, it must be owned, a fairly
satisfactory biography. Mr. Lee has not been able to contribute any new
facts to Shakespeare’s life, which is certainly not his fault; but he
has given us a recapitulation, as lucid as it is exhaustive, of all that
the industry of successive generations of memorialists from Ben Jonson
to Halliwell Phillipps has succeeded in accumulating, and he has been as
judicious in what he has rejected as in what he has adopted. From the
curse of the typical Shakespearian biographer--we mean the statement of
mere inference and hypothesis as fact--he is absolutely free. He has
done excellent service in giving, if not finishing, at least swashing
blows to the monstrous fictions of the theorists on the sonnets,
particularly to the Fitton-Pembroke mare’s nest, fictions which have
been gradually generating a Shakespeare, as purely apocryphal as the
Roland of the song or the Apollonius of Philostratus.
Mr. Lee’s most remarkable contribution to speculative Shakespearian
criticism, in which, we are glad to say, he does not often indulge, is
his contention that the W. H. of the dedication to the sonnets was
William Hall, a small piratical stationer. It is never wise to speak
positively on what must necessarily be, till certain evidence is
obtainable, a matter of speculation. But we are very much inclined to
think that Mr. Lee’s contention has at least something in its favour.
Our readers will remember that one of the chief points in the enigma of
the sonnets is the dedication, and it runs thus: “To the onlie begetter
of these ensuing Sonnets, Mr. W. H., all happiness and that eternitie
promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in
setting forth. T. T.” It has generally been assumed that the “W. H.” is
the youth who is the hero of the first group of sonnets, and the poet’s
friend, and he has commonly been identified either with William Herbert,
third Earl of Pembroke, or with Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of
Southampton. The difficulties in the way of either hypothesis--and on
each hypothesis not Babels merely, but cities of Babels have been
raised--are to an unprejudiced mind insurmountable. Mr. Lee maintains
with plausible ingenuity, but not, we think, conclusively, that there is
no proof that the youth of the sonnets was named “Will” at all. His
analysis of the “Will” sonnets is a masterpiece of subtle ingenuity, and
well deserves careful attention. He then proceeds to adopt the theory
that the word “begetter” is not to be taken in the sense of “inspirer,”
but simply as “procurer” or “obtainer” of the sonnets for T. T., _i.e._,
the publisher, Thomas Thorpe. In other words, that Thorpe dedicated the
sonnets to W. H., in return for W. H. having piratically obtained them
for him. This is at least doubtful. In the first place it may reasonably
be questioned whether “begetter” could have the meaning which is here
assigned to it; the passages quoted from _Hamlet_ (“acquire and beget a
temperance”) and from Dekker’s _Satiro-mastix_, “I have some cousins
german at Court shall beget you the reversion of the Master of the
King’s Revels,” are anything but conclusive. Still, Thorpe, who is by no
means remarkable for the purity of his English, may have used it in the
sense which Mr. Lee’s theory requires.
Shakespeare’s sonnets, as is well known, were circulating among his
friends in manuscript, and Mr. Lee has discovered that one William Hall
was well known as an Autolycus among publishers, and had already edited,
under the initials W. H., a collection of poems left by the Jesuit poet,
Southwell--in other words had already done for the publisher, George
Eld, what it is assumed that he now did for Thomas Thorpe. Mr. Lee’s
theory is, it must be admitted, plausible, and few would hesitate to
pronounce it far more probable than the theory which would identify the
enigmatical initials with the names of Pembroke or Southampton.
The chapters dealing with the sonnets are, in our opinion the most
valuable contribution which has ever been made to this important
province of Shakespearian study, and it may be said of Mr. Lee, as
Porson said of Bentley, that we may learn more from him when he is wrong
than from many others when they are right. His contention is, and it is
supported with exhaustive erudition, that these poems are, in the main,
a concession to the fashion, then so much in vogue, of sonnet writing;
that their themes are the conventional themes treated in those
compositions; that some of them were dedicated to Southampton, that some
may be autobiographical, but that they are wholly miscellaneous, and
tell no consecutive story, as so many critics have erroneously assumed.
We cannot accept all Mr. Lee’s theories and conclusions, but one thing
is certain, that they are supported with infinitely more skill and
learning than any other theories which have been broached on this
hopelessly baffling problem.
We will conclude by noticing what seem to us slight blemishes in this
admirable work. There is nothing to warrant the assertion on p. 158 that
most of Shakespeare’s sonnets were produced in 1594, which is to cut the
knot of a most difficult question. Indeed, with respect to the whole
question of the sonnets, Mr. Lee is, we venture to submit, a little too
dogmatic. It is a question which no one can settle as positively as Mr.
Lee seems to settle it. There is surely no good, or even plausible
reason for doubting the authenticity of _Titus Andronicus_, whatever
innumerable Shakespearian critics may say, external and internal
evidence alike being almost conclusive for its genuineness. There is
nothing to warrant the supposition that Shakespeare was on bad terms
with his wife. The famous bequest in his Will was probably a delicate
compliment, and we are surprised that Mr. Lee should not have noticed
this. Among the testimonies to Shakespeare in the seventeenth century,
Mr. Lee should have recorded that of Archbishop Sharp, who, according to
Speaker Onslow, used to say “that the Bible and Shakespeare had made him
Archbishop of York.”
Mr. Lee must also forgive us for adding that, in this work at least,
æsthetic criticism is not his strong point, and he would have done well
to keep it within even narrower bounds than he has done. Many of those
who would be the first to admire his erudition and the other scholarly
qualities which are so conspicuous in every chapter of his book, will,
we fear, take exception to much of his criticism, especially in relation
to the sonnets. It is too positive; it is unsympathetic; it is too
mechanical. But our debt to Mr. Lee is so great, that we feel almost
ashamed to make any deductions in our tribute of gratitude.
SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS[30]
[Footnote 30: _The Mystery of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: an attempted
Elucidation._ By Cuming Walters. _Testimony of the Sonnets as to the
Authorship of the Shakespearian Plays and Poems._ By Jesse Johnson.
_Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered and in part Re-arranged, with
Introductory Chapters, Notes and a Reprint of the Original 1609
Edition._ By Samuel Butler.]